Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, from The Earth from the Air. Photograph: Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Nick Crane is a cartographer, explorer, writer and television presenter. As a child, Nick explored the Norfolk countryside armed with a bicycle and a map and he has been journeying the world ever since.

In 1992–3, he walked 10,000km across Europe, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Black Sea. Since 2004, he has written and presented four popular television series for BBC Two: Coast, Great British Journeys, Map Man and Town.

"All the books on this list make me feel very lucky and happy. Just think: there are around 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and most of them have planets.

We don't know how many of those planets support life, but ours does, and these 10 books tell part of that story."

Ever wondered how rainbows got their colours, or what happens if you cut something into ever smaller pieces? This stunning book tells it as it is. Dawkins (the author of serious books such as The Selfish Gene) and the gifted illustrator Dave McKean (whose CV includes designs for Harry Potter characters) have teamed up to prove that scientific reality is far more exciting than myth and make-believe. Read this and you become a believer in our greatest miracle story - the story of our own planet. And it's all true!

Winner of the Planeta Environment Book of the Year award, this is a really accessible global primer on "the world's greatest challenge", and an ideal starting point from GCSE upward. It has lots and lots of maps, charts, photos, tables. Towards the back of the book, there's a page on personal action, and this is where you find out how to reduce the greenhouse emissions created by your home and car. A great book for the family bookshelves.

3. See Inside Planet Earth by Katie Daynes and Peter Allen

With over 80 flip-up panels, and packed with cheerful, cartoonish illustrations, this is an enjoyable, geographical starting point for age six upward. How can any youngster lift a flap in this book and not want to save the world! Winner of a silver award from the Geographical Association, when it was published in 2009, it's jokey and enticing, and 20p from every copy sold goes to Friends of the Earth.

Seven folk tales illustrating how different cultures on various parts of the planet's diverse surface try to live in harmony with the natural world. Each folk tale is followed by a hands-on activity that backs-up the eco-themes of the stories. Ideal for ages 5 to 11. It is illustrated by Anne Wilson, whose passion for print-making and collage wins the smiles of every child who peeks into its colourful pages.

Bill's a national treasure, though we've borrowed him really, because he's American. Every school library in the land ought to own a copy because this is core science at its most fun. Bill takes his readers on a journey, and we meet a lot of very strange, brilliant people like Edwin Hubble, Henri Becquerel and a chap called Einstein. The clever thing about Bill's book is that he visits many of the places he writes about. So hydrothermal explosions are explained during a trip to Yellowstone with a geologist called Doss, who rides a Harley Davidson. Why weren't my school science books like this, please sir?

The book we all treasure as a souvenir of the wonderful Blue Planet BBC series, fronted by Sir David Attenborough. Written by the show's producers, with a foreword by Sir David and over 400 colour pics, this is a celebration of oceans and their incredible wildlife. When I was young, I read a book about a gigantic man-eating octopus and for years I couldn't swim near a rock without imagining an encounter with a long, sticky tentacle. Page 211, with its pink, suckered 16-foot Pacific octopus, still makes me shiver.

7. Atlas by Gerardus Mercator

A cheeky inclusion, because I wrote the first major English-language biography of this inspiring 16th century Fleming - the world's greatest mapmaker and the man who invented the atlas. But he's my great hero, and although he wrote and drew his atlas 500 years ago, it's still available, with an English translation, on CD. Have a look, and you'll find that the world he thought he knew hadn't been fully explored; there are four islands at the North Pole!

Who hasn't dreamed of being a bird? A team led by French photographer, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, flew in helicopters above 75 countries gathering 100,000 photographs, which they slimmed down to the 195 in this gorgeous book. Rubbish heaps and rainforests are turned into the kinds of still life that force the reader to think about the impacts that we're all having on the precious, spinning ball of rock and water that we call Earth. You can't care about a place until you grasp its beauty.

My sister gave me this book as a present many, many years ago, and it's never beyond arms' reach while I'm sitting writing my own books. Everything about it is just right: the colouring of the maps, the range of scales, the clarity of the printing, and there are some really useful pages about things like population, climate and vegetation. I've spent a measurable amount of my life leafing through the mountains and plains of these pages, dreaming. Expensive, but then it's a book for life.

Oh I wish I'd seen this book when I was at school! Instead of failing chemistry O level, I'd have turned into a mad scientist and saved the world. It was published in 2009 and it's a sumptuous production, stuffed with gorgeous photos and a stunning layout. Recently it became a top-selling iPad app, too. Its subtitle is A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe. Did you know that Lanthanum oxide makes camping-lanterns glow brightly? Or that some of our planet's Iridium arrived on an asteroid 65 million years ago? Me neither.